1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a recording apparatus such as an ink-jet type recording apparatus.
2. Discussion of Related Art
There is conventionally known, as a recording apparatus, an ink-jet type recording apparatus which is arranged to perform recording such that an ink-jet head held by a carriage ejects ink droplets toward a recording medium which is disposed so as to be opposed to the ink-jet head with a predetermined spacing distance therebetween while the ink-jet head is moved along the recording medium.
As such an ink-jet type recording apparatus, there is known one, as disclosed in JP-A-2000-158643, whose ink-jet head (hereinafter referred to as “recording head”) is equipped with a drive circuit to which a record data signal and various control signals are inputted from a main circuit provided on a main body of the apparatus. In this apparatus, the recording head having ink ejection nozzles respectively corresponding to a plurality of channels is driven by the drive circuit.
In the conventional recording head described above, a drive-waveform signal is inputted to the drive circuit for driving the recording head. In some cases, a plurality of mutually different drive waveforms need to be prepared in order to eject ink droplets with a plurality of mutually different volume values for tone printing or the drive-waveform signal needs to be changed for each of blocks or each of rows of the nozzles for the purpose of reducing the peak of the power to be consumed or avoiding a crosstalk phenomenon. Further, because plural sorts of ink having respective different characteristics are used in a color printing operation, there is a demand to employ a drive waveform optimum for each of the respective characteristics of the plural sorts of ink. In those cases, the number of kinds of the drive waveform inevitably increases. With an increase in the number of kinds of the drive waveform, the number of signal lines through which the drive-waveform signal is inputted to the drive circuit increases.
The increase in the number of the signal lines makes the signal lines complicated. In addition, where a flexible flat cable is used for transmitting signals from the main circuit of the main body of the recording apparatus to the drive circuit of the recording head, the flexible flat cable inevitably has an increased width, resulting in complicated connection of the flexible flat cable and increased costs in production and maintenance of the recording apparatus.
In view of the above, it is proposed in the above-identified publication JP-A-2000-158643 to reduce the number of the signal lines through which the drive-waveform signals are inputted to the drive circuit provided on the recording head from the main circuit provided on the main body of the recording apparatus by mounting drive-waveform-signal generating circuits on the recording head. Namely, data such as a pulse width necessary for generating the drive-waveform signals is serially transmitted beforehand to the drive-waveform-signal generating circuits mounted on the recording head and the drive-waveform-signal generating circuits are arranged to respectively output, on the basis of the data, the drive-waveform signals concurrently with initiation of the recording operation.